No News Is Good News

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No News Is Good News

How about a channel about what's really happening on earth - namely, nothing.

When Orson Welles was planning his notorious 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, he decided to set his spoof in some Everytown, USA. To choose one, he closed his eyes and plunged a finger onto a map. When he opened his eyes, he found that digit on Grover's Mill, New Jersey. On October 30, 1938, Welles's faked "live-action" account of a Martian attack on a small New Jersey town sparked panic along the Eastern seaboard.

But what's the news these days from Grover's Mill? What happens there when Martians are not landing? Grover's Mill is the place that comes to mind when I wonder why we don't use broadcast television for more than news. It is the place that makes me ask why, when we have department-store video security and parking-deck video security (see "Caught" page 116), we can't also have a means of global video security.

Broadcast television brings us word and image of the new and the novel, but why have we never thought to use it to bring other kinds of information? And in answering that question do we answer the other, perennial question: Why is there no good news on TV? Consider that closed-circuit television brings us mostly the old and same, the constant and unchanging. Do we perhaps need a set of video security cameras for the whole world, a new kind of TV that offers not only the new and novel but the old and the same - the routine of life in a village square, a town center, a savanna, or a prairie.

TV, that is, from the Grover's Mills all over the planet - from Tibet or Ghana, Taipei or Tirana. Here's the idea: spin a globe and throw the darts. Station six, ten, a dozen cameras randomly around the globe, feeding into unused or underused cable channels. Run them all the time.

Why? To remind us of how little is happening most places most of the time, as a useful corrective to our obsessive and driven sense of news.

NASA talks about its "mission to planet earth," the use of the space shuttle to survey the distant reaches of the globe. So think of these cameras as a kind of extraterrestrial probes deployed from some distant civilization, landing in random locations. What would the Martians really see if they landed here?

Sure, there are potential problems to be worked out. What happens when someone sets up a billboard in front of the camera? When the shop owner rents advertising space by the hour on the side of his store, which just happens to be in the view? When lines of hundreds form just to wave and smile and enact the NFL sideline "Hi Mom"? Do you attempt to control these effects, or let them happen, as incidental results of a kind of conceptual project?

All this can be part of the experiment, side effects to the main therapy, which is to change our sense of the world. Think of it as a world video security-camera system, because nothing would contribute more to our sense of sharing a planet than a sense that we hold banalities in common.

We might better imagine the true meaning of "global village" if we remembered it includes Grover's Mill.